The approval of torture by the Bush administration seemed to come from the highest levels, and it seems that this use of torture was largely futile. There is tremendous precedent for use of torture and the body of information suggests strongly that the information gained is largely useless.
There is, however, one frustrating argument in favor of the use of torture to extract information from non-cooperative individuals and it goes like this:
There is a bomb that will go off in 24 hours and it is in the middle of a huge metropolitan area. If you can 'extract' this information, you can save millions of people.
While torture if repugnant and goes against everything that we have come to believe in, how does one deal with a situation like this?
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